Covers are a tricky endeavor. Interpreters must balance the essence of a song with their own perspective on it.
Bill Frisell’s reduction of the entire Billy the Kind orchestral score to a stage band is the extreme epitome of that balance. Guns N’ Roses’ painfully bloated cover of the Rolling Stones’ "Sympathy for the Devil" falls on the other end of that spectrum.
ACO has managed to make a number of distinct covers in the past few years. Her lush version of Radiohead’s "Creep" highlights the tenderness behind the self-loathing of the song. And she doesn’t cleanse the lyrics for a Puritanical audience either.
Even though I openly list them in my RYM vinyl collection, even though I list them in my CD collection as well, even though I think the London studio cast recording of Chess needs desperately to be remastered, I still refuse to acknowledge ABBA’s formative influence on my music fandom.
(It was ABBA, not Duran Duran, who were the first artists I saw on music video.)
Still, The Visitors is an album quite incongruous with the kitsch of ABBA’s heyday, and it’s a remarkable document of the band’s demise.
When I saw the commercials for the movie Happy Feet, the first thing I thought of was 8 1/2 Souvenirs. I’m probably not the only Austinite who lived through Web 1.0 to think so.
8 1/2 Souvenirs was a swing band when swing was big among the dot-com yuppie hipsters. Although anchored by the smooth guitar and suave vocals of founder Olivier Giraud, the stars of the band were singer Chrysta Bell and pianist Glover Gill. In my mind, Gill moreso than Bell.
Gill could make a piano sound like an orchestra, and his dynamic playing was a potent glue for the Souvenirs’ sound. The difference was stark on Twisted Desire, the band’s final studio album recorded after Gill left.
I have the technical skill to publish a database of my entire music collection online, but I don’t have the inclination to spend that much development time doing it. So instead, I’m letting Rate Your Music do it for me.
I spent the last few days pretty much putting everything online, including albums I don’t even own anymore. I even went so far as to include vinyl and cassettes, the latter of which I sold off nearly four years ago. As of this writing, 1,273 albums are listed in my profile. Yeah, that’s small beans compared to hardcore collectors.
Limited Express (has gone?) has really gone, so says Bounce.com. The band announced its dissolution through its official website on Dec. 31, 2006. Each of the trio’s members will pursue individual projects, according to the band’s statement.
When Natalie Merchant announced she was leaving 10,000 Maniacs back in 1994, my first thought was to wish John Lombardo would rejoin the band and bring Mary Ramsey as Merchant’s replacement. And that’s exactly what happened.
Lombardo and Ramsey had been performing under the moniker John & Mary, and the duo recorded two albums for RykoDisc that sounded just like the Maniacs. Perhaps the presence of Maniacs drummer Jerome Augustinyak and guitarist Rob Buck had something to do with that.
Ramsey herself toured with 10,000 Maniacs, playing viola and singing back-up. (She can be heard on the band’s MTV Unplugged appearance.) So it seemed like a perfect match, and for a time, it was.
Here’s the chronology of events as I remember them:
1987 — 10,000 Maniacs includes a cover of Cat Stevens’ "Peace Train" on In My Tribe
1989 — Yusuf Islam (a.k.a. Cat Stevens) declares his support of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie’s life.
1989 — 10,000 Maniacs pulls "Peace Train" off of subsequent pressings of In My Tribe.
I bought In My Tribe on vinyl, just as 10,000 Maniacs were starting to gain momentum, and "Peace Train" was on it. By the time I started converting my vinyl collection to CD, the band had already pulled "Peace Train" from the album. I found a used CD that included the track at a music shop near the University of Hawaiʻi campus.
A while back, I floated the idea of writing about only music already in my album collection. I noticed when I post a "Listen" column, I tend to write more personally about music than I would a review or a news item.
I want to do more of that — write personally, that is.
So I brought the two ideas together into a year-long project: "365 Days, 365 Files." My New Year’s Resolution for this site in 2007 is to write about a particular song every day for the whole year.